High Art Fridays (HAF) 67: new member show 5

It is with great pleasure that I bring to you High Art Friday’s 5th group show. It has become customary that HAF periodically showcases its newest members work in a group showing. It is a virtual group show. To see the collection in one place, is an exciting experience. There is a thread that joins these Artists together; it is not based on race or religion, but on an aesthetic parallel that I believe transforms oftentimes in a spiritual likeness. As quoted in HAF’s description mission statement: This group is far from traditional standards and lean toward the abstract, drawing from a more subconscious pool of thought and movement. It challenges tradition with sometimes radical and disturbing results. So we will move forward and see where this road leads us; most likely “A road less traveled” I think art has great power to heal, inspire and change the manner in which we think; it opens us!!
It is exciting to witness the growth of HAF from September 2013. We continue to span the globe with uniquely talented Artists who share something, I believe that travels beyond the line, color, shape elements that renders the final work; it can be often seen as a soul connection, bringing unique cultures together.
I am not much of a statistician to determine the percent of Artist increase since the last group show. All I know is HAF has been growing at a steady rate with very talent Artists
There are so many rich stories amongst the Artists who create these works; oftentimes the language barriers keep their stories from being understood by all. I am incorporating short biographical information on several Artists, so you can get a better understanding of the person behind the art.

JoAnne Lobotsky, USA
I’ve been making art for about 40 years (!). My early focus was in sculpture – I did installation type projects out of mostly wood and paint. I am self-taught for the most part as a painter although took a couple oil painting classes at the ASL in NY many years ago. So I have been painting since 2001. Currently I am exploring thick acrylic paint and also mixed media projects. It is exciting for me because they are more like objects, which relates to the sculpture I used to do although very different of course. I am currently exploring these materials that are new to me and already liking the immediacy of the acrylic paint and other materials like cloth, paper, etc. I am excited to see where this leads.
Eda Taşlı, Turkey
Eda lives in Bodrum, Turkey and is currently working on a project for an artist in residence program. She is creating a large scale wood sculpture for the owner of Casa Dell Arte Otel, a major Art collector who is very interested in emerging Artists.
Guarino Carla, Italy
I am currently working on several projects in different materials. I’ m experimenting with how far they can take pictorial value or Plastic. I think everything in the world to have had a past time can make us feel the life force. My creative process occurs spontaneously and very gradual. Nothing is random. Everything is very thought out and reasoned, according to provisions: geometric, almost mathematical. Everything takes on a value light weight, form and content. Photography is essential in my work; written on walls, posters, gates, windows. If we think that the writing on the wall has a long history; indeed, it already appears on the wall of the ancient cities of Pompeii and Ercolano. They communicated value and their meaning remains the same: the desire of man to be present to life. My Artistic research has gradually evolved during the last fifteen years. After completing studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, (Italy), I ‘m completely dedicated to painting touch. I have experienced the potential of color in the real space. I later associated with this , the use of different materials such as papers, bags, gauze. Currently also the color has assumed the same function of any other material. Everything comes from debris, fragments of element collected over time, and taking on support artistic value.
Judy Shreve, USA
I worked with clay for about 20 years before starting to paint. About 4 years ago I switched to earthenware which required a more painterly approach for a surface treatment. I never thought I could draw or paint – but when I started doing it, I fell in love. I soon grew tired of waiting on the kiln for my paintings and started using paper and acrylics. I now work on birch panels using acrylics, charcoal, oil pastels and sometimes Derwent Pencils.
I am currently working to supply two galleries – Bennett Galleries/Nashville, TN and High Country Art/Blue Ridge, GA
Susanne Schmidt-Nielsen, Denmark
Susanne’s most recent installation was arranged in an operating room of a close down hospital.
These days i work mostly 3D. On the Wall in the surgery room there is a light board. On that one I have made 3 little paper plastic works. They are prints of Photos of my own work, color samples, close-up of drawings, as well as photographs of spills of latex … Printed and layered. This was a very interesting and new way for me to work.
I have, at the moment, a wide range of material that i use, but I have some that I seem to be using more often because they carry the feeling and therefore helps the story I want to tell. I prefer materials that are familiar to us … material as fabric of various kinds, thread, cement, paper, wax, latex, wood and metal. We are familiar with the physicality of the material. And I also love the low tone of color these material carry. I never add color to my sculptural work. When I want to express a feeling I search for the right material, and this sometimes takes me to new material, like the polyester … The pink fabric is one of those that keeps coming in use … its transparent, it seems fragile, with latex on, it becomes skin like and still transparent… and it’s to be sewn in, which gives a feeling of something familiar and well-known to us humans as sewing has been used over centuries. I do have a love for material and am curious of them and love to become know with then. This broadens my possibility of expressing myself. I wanted to write I love to handle the material, to touch, to use my hands….
Cindy Mersky British Columbia
Cindy completed a 4 year Visual Communications program at the Alberta College of Art and continued her education at the University of Toronto, where she earned a B.Sc. in Art as Applied to Medicine. In 2013, Cindy was awarded an international artist residency at the prestigious Mark Rothko Art Centre in Daugavpils, Latvia. Seven of her paintings are now in their permanent collection. In 2014, she was awarded another international artist residency in Tbilisi, Georgia. The work Cindy created during that time is in the public collection of the City of Mtskheta, Georgia. “My paintings explore themes which deal with religion, dreams, transitional periods and faded memories of places or events. What starts out as a field of color and texture soon becomes eroded into a carnival of scarred remains, leaving only a sense of unreality and the possibility of a new beginning. They are documents of change.”

HAF: what is your relationship with the circle motif?
Cindy: When I moved from representational work to non-objective painting, I did a piece that utilized a grid and repeated shape to help me facilitate the transition. The painting was layered and hand-sanded to reveal the colors beneath, which was less controlled than the grid and circles. I showed the piece to my then mentor, and he said to keep going in this direction until you take it as far as you can. The hand-sanding changed to using an electric sander. All pieces are acrylic and/or mixed media on canvas. I like the ‘tension’ created when using an electric sander on canvas vs board.

HAF: Is it possible to articulate how the circle motif makes you feel?
Cindy: I’d say it’s my safe place within a world of unpredictability and random events. I know that it will always be there to maintain the balance, so it also facilitates freedom
and experimentation.

Pierre Albasser, France
After a professional career as an engineer in building and civil engineering works, Pierre became a self-taught artist after early retirement in 1992. Following his wife’s encouragement, he then started to draw, using only a ball-point, on envelopes (for the mail art networks) and on little bits of cardboard he had collected. Other than his circle of acquaintances, his graphical creations have aroused the interest of the Musée de la Création Franche in Bègles which invited him for a first personal exhibition in 1999.Over the course of time, colored felt pens and other crayons have enriched the equipment, all of them recycled, that is to say begged from friends or storekeepers, even picked up off the streets, etc. So far he has been faithful to cardboard packaging from his own household (food, cosmetics, medicine),out of modesty as much as for fun because their extravagant shapes are challenging to imagination and improvisation. He draws every day. “No preferential subjects; they come as they please and whenever they please”, says the artist. If he is asked to exhibit his work, he is delighted about it. However, commercial success does not bother him. He has no objective; his main pleasure is to create. But he is very sensitive to appreciation of recognition pleasure is to create. But he is very sensitive to appreciation of recognition from lovers of unusual art.

Alicia Larsson, Sweden – Spain
“I’m a Swedish-Spanish artist. I have always been passionate about painting and been painting since I was a little girl. Then I had a long break during my “family building period” and came back to art 5 years ago. Mostly self-taught though I frequented for one year at the Atelier des beaux arts de la ville de Paris. I paint mostly with acrylics mixing with charcoal, pastels or pencil. I paint in most surfaces, experimenting and always searching for the new, the unexpected. I paint memories, emotional states, private judgments, moments always in an abstract- expressive spirit I have exhibited in Sweden, Spain, Portugal and Italy. I’m currently working on several projects among others a show in Stockholm and some shows abroad with my partner
in art and love.

Barbara Byrne Klare, USA
“I am an artist at Marin MOCA in Novato, CA. In the 90s, I worked as a commercial textile designer. Now I work directly with fabric and natural materials. I am drawn to materials that by simple alchemy mimic something else: Tyvek that imitates folded origami paper, brown paper bag strips that look like knotted leather, twisted fabric that hangs like worn, frayed rope, or indigo silk that drapes in waves.”
Michael Springer, New Zealand
I just try to paint from my gut each day , get beyond the eternal noise and explore .. Love it when I find here and there, new surfaces to work on – especially with rough textures that cannot be denied.

Lucy Namayanja, U.K
Lucy is fascinated with Eros and Thanatos in equal measure. She confronts the relationship between craft and technology through the media of sand, oil and archival pigment ink. The resulting art is visually arresting and simultaneously inviting. The works combine elements of popular and unpopular ‘desirable’ forms. They are figurative distortions of self-portraits and landscapes, which feed into her work. The paintings are seductive in their fashion and often grotesque in their themes.
HAF: what is eros and thanatos?
Lucy: Eros is the drive of life, love, creativity, and sexuality, self-satisfaction, and species preservation. Thanatos, from the Greek word for “death” is the drive of aggression, sadism, destruction, violence, and death.
HAF: such dichotomy in your work. very honest projections, that most people push under a rug and hide
Lucy: its true people push it under, I was shy at first to come out with it because of my personal life, until I had to come to terms realizing how things are.
HAF: yes indeed Lucy, indeed. I think most times it is the Artist that is a good candidate for such openness
Lucy: Yes indeed that’s true but also through life experience; to come across people who can have these conversations with depth, artist need them some times in a way to ease ourselves and be understood with what we do almost like a preacher or teacher just to be able to talk about it in general. It’s fascinating.

Fosco Sileoni, Italy

“In the work of Fosco Sileoni is possible to identify some common elements that lead to consider his art as a process of construction of meaning. This can be simplified through some concepts that pass the trait to the sign, and the sign to the meaning. In fact, if the stroke is not just a line, it is precisely because it is done by a gesture. A gesture that for Fosco is visceral and without mediation; this thing that is beginning to take on a higher level, namely that of the sign. And ‘here in fact that its done starts marcarsi, more properly to be marked. In this dimension you receive support his allegiance and became property of the idea. A clear idea is his, which does not hesitate, granting only a few references to the form, and that denies categorically the possibility of pascersi in any seduction harmonica. But it is precisely through those brief references that Fosco can not suppress, worth losing the sense of orientation, that his work enters the realm of meaning. And ‘here in fact that it can start talking. And when it starts to do it, he does it with a language often sting, in the sense of speaking “in fact are basic, again like to state that when something has too many nuances, is probably a trick. The ambition of his painting, in the making seemingly simple, actually unfolds in a rather complex manner. This is the search for truth, but not of what you see, rather than what you do not, that is what is right. And it is through the mediation of the intimate its sense, and with unconditional trust in the purity of his creative act, that threatens the seal of naivete, which Fosco constantly tries to show this kind of truth: the truth. Will it succeed? No, we are sure. The one at the bottom it is not his job, and Fosco aware. That is not the job of his painting, but of everyone.

Thanks to all the Artists who participated in the show today; I hope the viewer enjoyed the spectacular presentation today.